Bred by the Spartans (4 page)

Thaleia saw the blond Grace take a little pot from a shelf, and take a salve of some sort onto her fingers. “I am going to take the hair away from your nether parts,” she explained.

“Oh… but…” The Grace was already working the divine salve into Thaleia’s most tender places.

“Zeus likes a girl’s shameful parts to be nice and smooth for him.”

The dark-haired Grace said, “And he says he likes girls to feel like they can’t hide their charms from him.”

As the Grace rubbed the salve there, upon Thaleia’s private cleft and even around the little ring of her bottom, Thaleia sighed and whimpered. The Grace’s fingers seemed to waken again the lovely, awful feeling Eros had inspired, and which she recognized now she had started to feel the moment she had seen Clea between the two great gods over the dining couch.

In a kind of haze of pleasure that somehow seemed to be increased by the divine salve, Thaleia watched the red-haired Grace take a pair of bronze tweezers from the shelf. She shook her head, but she seemed powerless to move under the fingers of the blond Grace, and she could only watch as the tweezers came close and grasped the first of her tender curls between her thighs.

Thaleia was terrified, but the salve somehow made the pain of the plucking very different from what she expected. It wasn’t unpleasant; it felt very much like Zeus’ spanks and Aphrodite’s lashes, and she began to cry out.

The blond Grace kept working the salve into Thaleia’s secret places, even putting a slender finger inside Thaleia’s bottom, and three more inside the grotto that lay hidden behind her maiden furrow. Thaleia moaned, over and over, and one by one the red-haired Grace took away all her private tresses.

When the process had reached something like the halfway mark, the dark-haired Grace began to accompany the bodily preparation with a verbal one.

“You must make up your mind, little Thaleia,” she said, “to give pleasure to the men who will enjoy you. If you do, you will take your own pleasure from theirs, and your life, even though it will be a mortal life, will be lovely.”

Thaleia thought again of Clea, and of the way she had looked when Thaleia had asked if she was alright.

“It will not be easy for you. Zeus has decided to break you tonight because you have shown your nature to be a defiant nature, and that defiant nature, though it will see you through many trials, will also make your life difficult. Most mortal men will not understand, and they will ravish you and leave you to other men. They will not realize that if they were a different sort of man they would find in you a great prize, and they will not realize that you need two of them. That is what Eros meant when he said that you can never confess that you will yearn to be used by two men for their pleasure in your abasement. I give you a hope, though, now. If two men should come who can make you confess, despite the curse of Eros, that you yearn to be theirs, completely, you will find a happiness beyond fate.”

Chapter Four

After they had prepared Thaleia in the little room, dressing her in a white chiton that came down only to the middle of Thaleia’s thighs, with golden pins at her shoulders, and gathering her hair with a jeweled comb so that it flowed down over her left shoulder, the Graces led her through the entrance room into the great hall of Aphrodite.

As a rosy glow had suffused the air of the entrance room, it became clear to Thaleia that the red, flickering glow that she had seen through the doorway suffused the air of this enormous chamber, whose walls to either side and at the far end Thaleia could not even see.

Now also was answered at last the mystery of where the scene she had heard unfolding between Lord Hephaestus and Lady Aphrodite had taken place. In the center of the hall stood a raised platform, reached by three steps and lit by twelve torches, which made it stand out as the only truly bright place in the entire chamber. Upon that platform three Desires, cousins of the Graces, were tying a girl to a frame of wood. Next to the frame stood Aphrodite herself, her lash in her hand.

As the Graces led Thaleia forward, she watched with horrified fascination as Aphrodite brought her whip down upon the lovely upraised bottom of the girl, which was all Thaleia could see of her. The sound of the lash, and the cry of the victim, echoed through the hall and, Thaleia realized, must be carried to the colonnade, and the Olympic avenue, above.

“Who is it?” she could not help whispering.

“That’s Erato,” the red-haired Grace whispered back. “The Muses play a game with Lord Apollo: he takes one of them to his bed every week, but he has her whipped first.”

“What? Why?”

“You’ll see. Calliope is the only one who doesn’t admit that she loves it, but that’s only because she thinks it’s beneath her dignity.”

Aphrodite whipped Erato’s bottom again, and then she put her hand down between the Muse’s thighs. “Wet again, Erato, of course. Naughty girl.” The whip fell once more. Thaleia felt faint. Suddenly she knew that she wanted to be in Erato’s place.

The Graces stopped her ten paces from the platform. “It will be your turn next,” the blond Grace told her. “Lady Aphrodite will release Erato, and she will depart through the tunnels to Apollo’s bedchamber, in his halls.” That explained at last how it could be that Thaleia had never seen any god or goddess going or coming from the halls of Aphrodite.

To distract herself from the spectacle that truth to tell was making Thaleia herself very wet, with the moisture that she had finally begun to understand the night before when she peeked into Zeus’
andron
, she asked, “When Zeus brought me here, I heard…”

“Oh, yes,” replied the dark-haired Grace. “That was Lady Aphrodite’s weekly session with Lord Hephaestus. You know about Aphrodite and Ares, I am sure?” She saw Thaleia’s blank expression and sighed. “Your parents have strange ideas about how to raise young goddesses, it seems. Anyway, Ares and Aphrodite have been doing the deeds of Eros for millennia, though Aphrodite’s lord is of course the smith god Hephaestus. About three centuries ago, they worked out an arrangement that satisfies all three of them: Lord Hephaestus punishes and has Aphrodite roughly every week, and the rest of the week she may give herself to Ares.”

“So when I came…”

“They were just finishing the punishment. I imagine you felt some of their lust being channeled by Eros?”

Thaleia remembered what had happened to her as she had tried to run across the sanctuary of Aphrodite. She nodded.

“I must have interrupted the session…”

The dark-haired Grace giggled. “Yes. Aphrodite was none too happy about that. She had to go back to Hephaestus and rouse him again, and when he is balked, he uses her even more roughly.”

The red-haired Grace gave a wry little laugh. “Although our lady likes that best of all. You may find her in a good mood tonight.”

Thaleia looked at the goddess of lust, who seemed to be finishing Erato’s whipping. The Muse’s bottom bore a lace pattern of fiery red lines, and she was moaning ambiguously. The expression upon Aphrodite’s face certainly looked happier than it had been the last time Thaleia had seen it.

The Desires released Erato from the whipping frame. Aphrodite opened her arms, and chastiser and chastised embraced. “Thank you,” Thaleia heard the Muse say, and then she turned and, picking up a chiton that she did not bother to don, she trotted off into the darkness to Thaleia’s right, the direction in which must lie the rest of the Olympian enclave.

Aphrodite turned to her. “Thaleia,” she said, “it is time.”

Thaleia trembled, but she knew it would not avail her to try to resist. More than anything else, she dreaded to be subjected once again to the power of Eros, made to touch herself again that way, desperately showing her body’s need for those shameful sensations. Much better to be whipped, she thought, and she stepped forward.

“Farewell,” she heard each of the Graces say softly, behind her.

Thaleia turned, intending to thank them, but the Graces had begun to fall back toward the very outskirts of the light that came from the torches illuminating Aphrodite’s platform. Now Thaleia saw that there were many—perhaps countless—deities standing just there, just outside the light, watching the rites of Aphrodite. Shocked, she realized that in the near-darkness naked gods and goddesses lay upon sleeping couches watching… and enjoying the delights of the halls’ patroness and her wanton son.

Thaleia turned back toward the platform and saw Aphrodite tap her whip against her palm, not impatiently, but to let Thaleia know that the great goddess would soon become impatient if Thaleia did not move forward now.

And so Thaleia did, with halting step. She had reached the steps, looking only at her feet as she walked. She turned her eyes upward and saw that in addition to the whipping frame there was an enormous sleeping couch, arrayed with pillows, atop the platform. As she noticed it, she remembered the way her mother had described Aphrodite, when she had taught Argeia and Thaleia about the Olympians: “She is the soft goddess, the goddess of the soft things of… of the night.” Mother had seemed to be at a loss for words; indeed, she seemed to be blushing. When Argeia had said, “What things, Mother?” Mother had said, “Things you are not old enough to understand,” and that had been the end of it.

Thaleia could imagine that Aphrodite had power over soft things like the pillows on that sleeping couch, as over the kinds of kisses she had seen pass between her parents, but she wondered now whether her mother knew about the hardness of which Aphrodite also claimed herself to be mistress: whips, and cocks, and thrusting hips. Eros’ magic had put a craving for that hardness in her that, Thaleia thought as she climbed the steps to the dais of Aphrodite, might drive her mad. She knew it would hurt, but she wanted it to hurt.

And, much worse, as she contemplated what she would say to the goddess of lust when she reached the top of the platform, she knew she would have to say something like, “No, Lady Aphrodite, please… spare me… make me a goddess again… and…”

Thaleia said that now, with her eyes still downcast, not daring to look at the great goddess. And she meant it, even though the part of her that didn’t mean it raged and cried out for hardness, cried out to be used as roughly as a god could use a mortal. Thaleia was scared. Thaleia was innocent; she was a good girl. Every instinct in her soul told her that good girls didn’t do what Lord Zeus said he would do to her tonight.

“And what, child?” Aphrodite asked, not unkindly, but with a smile in her voice that made Thaleia look up at last into her eyes.

“Don’t… don’t let Lord Zeus…”

Then Aphrodite laughed. Thaleia could tell that Aphrodite did not mean to be cruel, but that she could not suppress her mirth at the notion that she, the goddess of lust, would prevent Zeus the thunder-wielder from possessing Thaleia’s little bottom.

“Do not hope for that, Thaleia,” Aphrodite said. “Lord Zeus will ride your backside tonight, make no mistake. The grace I offer, however, is a much greater one, although it is yours already, without my interference, for I am in all things, always already.”

Thaleia felt her face twist with confusion.

Aphrodite put out her hand to touch Thaleia’s cheek, and continued, “It will hurt to have his mighty cock there, and it will be the most shameful thing you have ever known… but listen to me closely, Thaleia.”

Thaleia did not think she had ever listened to anyone more closely.

“That part of you… the part that has always wanted so much more even than Olympus, that wanted to play strange games of captured cities and ravished maidens… that part will come to life, at last, as Zeus fucks you in your little ring. You are going to the lands of men, where those games you imagined will become real.”

Thaleia felt herself blush. How had Aphrodite known that was what she had thought of, when she had seen Lord Zeus and Lord Poseidon with Clea? How had the great goddess known that Thaleia had remembered that fantasy that she’d had, on hearing for the first time the tale of the
Argo
, and the golden fleece—that she was Medea, and that Jason gave her to the Dioscuri, Castor and Polydeuces, and that they had put their hands all over her, and spanked her, and taken her chiton so that they could look at her and touch her all over?

Now Aphrodite took Thaleia by her upper arm and led her to the whipping frame, which was like a bench with a very narrow top and ropes in many places. The goddess of the soft and the hard bent her over and tied her down so that, Thaleia knew, she must look just as Erato had looked, with her bottom presented spread open, to the watching audience in the great hall of lust. Did she imagine it, or as Aphrodite lifted the skirt of Thaleia’s chiton to reveal her naked rear, did an appreciative murmur go through that audience, alongside the continual moans she seemed to hear from goddesses and gods undergoing the pleasure of those who enjoyed them on the sleeping couches scattered around the chamber?

As Aphrodite secured Thaleia’s arms, she said quietly in Thaleia’s ear, “Such a shame that you will have so difficult a time telling the mortal men who ravish you what you really want. So sad that they must ravish you every time, and beat you, and hold you down, and tie you up.”

But as Thaleia thought about the words, she realized that Lady Aphrodite’s tone dripped with irony. It was
not
a shame. It was
not
sad, Aphrodite meant, both because she and Zeus would enjoy seeing Thaleia abased and broken—seeing her punished for her resistance to Zeus’ enjoyment of Thaleia in the rites of Aphrodite—and because, Thaleia realized with a rush of arousal that she could feel dripping shamefully down her spread thighs, Thaleia herself craved exactly that.

Was what Zeus and Aphrodite were doing to her a blessing, truly? Were they all somehow fulfilling the dictates of the Moirae, the spinning ladies who had homes on Olympus but also in the Halls of Hades?

The lash of Aphrodite caressed Thaleia’s backside. Its leather braids found out her shame, and Thaleia whimpered as she felt her wetness flow at the sensation of the leather upon her newly hairless furrow. The lash left her, and then returned, hard, and again, and again.